Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky Considering my most recent work, I would have to say that Fyodor Dostoyevsky is my biggest literary influence. Dostoyevsky wrote within the context of 19th century Russian society. This gave him the unique ability to comment on the troubles, both politically and socially, within that society. He himself was no stranger to hardship, his mother died of tuberculosis (the same disease that would later claim his wife) when he was young and Dostoyevsky was exiled to Siberia for a time. To my knowledge, he has never won a major award, but was recognized and was fairly successful during his life. Dostoyevsky is mostly known for his books Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. While I love both of these books, it is his earlier work; Notes from Underground that I find particularly influential. The psychological nature of the book is deeply appealing to me, and I think he uses much of the same concepts in his later, more sociological, works. In fact, I think that Raskolnikov is loosely based on the underground man. What I really like about Notes From Underground is how Dostoyevsky seems to put himself in his writing. The underground man is unnamed, but his personal revelations about human nature is so deep and so genuine that you can not but think that it is Dostoyevsky himself talking. The style ofthe book really lets the reader get inside the main character’s head; he lets you know what the character is thinking, and what is the motivation for their actions.This is something that I really try to draw on for my own writing. I think that this honest evaluation of what drives the human mind, particularly the dark and evil things, is an interesting element that is often neglected. I also enjoy his portrayal of a first person unreliable narrator, a character dark, yet human enough, that a regular person can sympathize with him and even see some of themselves within his character. Prompt: Write a short story in which your main character does something dispicable, yet within the bounds of everyday humanity (Dostoyevsky's example would be running into someone on purpose on the sidewalk because this person had ignored you earlier). Write it in such a way that the character reveals their thoughts, both before and after their actions. What (if anything) prompted them to do such a thing? If you feel comfortable you can try to write this piece from the confines of your own thoughts and actions. Notes From the Underground Part 1: Chapter 3 With people who know how to revenge themselves and to stand up for themselves in general, how is it done? Why, when they are possessed, let us suppose, by the feeling of revenge, then for the time there is nothing else but that feeling left in their whole being. Such a gentleman simply dashes straight for his object like an infuriated bull with its horns down, and nothing but a wall will stop him. (By the way: facing the wall, such gentlemen -- that is, the "direct" persons and men of action -- are genuinely nonplussed. For them a wall is not an evasion, as for us people who think and consequently do nothing; it is not an excuse for turning aside, an excuse for which we are always very glad, though we scarcely believe in it ourselves, as a rule. No, they are nonplussed in all sincerity. The wall has for them something tranquillising, morally soothing, final-maybe even something mysterious ... but of the wall later.) Well, such a direct person I regard as the real normal man, as his tender mother nature wished to see him when she graciously brought him into being on the earth. I envy such a man till I am green in the face. He is stupid. I am not disputing that, but perhaps the normal man should be stupid, how do you know? Perhaps it is very beautiful, in fact. And I am the more persuaded of that suspicion, if one can call it so, by the fact that if you take, for instance, the antithesis of the normal man, that is, the man of acute consciousness, who has come, of course, not out of the lap of nature but out of a retort (this is almost mysticism, gentlemen, but I suspect this, too), this retort-made man is sometimes so nonplussed in the presence of his antithesis that with all his exaggerated consciousness he genuinely thinks of himself as a mouse and not a man. It may be an acutely conscious mouse, yet it is a mouse, while the other is a man, and therefore, et caetera, et caetera. And the worst of it is, he himself, his very own self, looks on himself as a mouse; no one asks him to do so; and that is an important point. Now let us look at this mouse in action. Let us suppose, for instance, that it feels insulted, too (and it almost always does feel insulted), and wants to revenge itself, too. There may even be a greater accumulation of spite in it than in l'homme de la nature et de la vérité. The base and nasty desire to vent that spite on its assailant rankles perhaps even more nastily in it than in l'homme de la nature et de la vérité . For through his innate stupidity the latter looks upon his revenge as justice pure and simple; while in consequence of his acute consciousness the mouse does not believe in the justice of it. To come at last to the deed itself, to the very act of revenge. Apart from the one fundamental nastiness the luckless mouse succeeds in creating around it so many other nastinesses in the form of doubts and questions, adds to the one question so many unsettled questions that there inevitably works up around it a sort of fatal brew, a stinking mess, made up of its doubts, emotions, and of the contempt spat upon it by the direct men of action who stand solemnly about it as judges and arbitrators, laughing at it till their healthy sides ache. Of course the only thing left for it is to dismiss all that with a wave of its paw, and, with a smile of assumed contempt in which it does not even itself believe, creep ignominiously into its mouse-hole. There in its nasty, stinking, underground home our insulted, crushed and ridiculed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in cold, malignant and, above all, everlasting spite. For forty years together it will remember its injury down to the smallest, most ignominious details, and every time will add, of itself, details still more ignominious, spitefully teasing and tormenting itself with its own imagination. It will itself be ashamed of its imaginings, but yet it will recall it all, it will go over and over every detail, it will invent unheard of things against itself, pretending that those things might happen, and will forgive nothing. Maybe it will begin to revenge itself, too, but, as it were, piecemeal, in trivial ways, from behind the stove, incognito, without believing either in its own right to vengeance, or in the success of its revenge, knowing that from all its efforts at revenge it will suffer a hundred times more than he on whom it revenges itself, while he, I daresay, will not even scratch himself. On its deathbed it will recall it all over again, with interest accumulated over all the years and ... But it is just in that cold, abominable half despair, half belief, in that conscious burying oneself alive for grief in the underworld for forty years, in that acutely recognised and yet partly doubtful hopelessness of one's position, in that hell of unsatisfied desires turned inward, in that fever of oscillations, of resolutions determined for ever and repented of again a minute later-that the savour of that strange enjoyment of which I have spoken lies. It is so subtle, so difficult of analysis, that persons who are a little limited, or even simply persons of strong nerves, will not understand a single atom of it. "Possibly," you will add on your own account with a grin, "people will not understand it either who have never received a slap in the face," and in that way you will politely hint to me that I, too, perhaps, have had the experience of a slap in the face in my life, and so I speak as one who knows. I bet that you are thinking that. But set your minds at rest, gentlemen, I have not received a slap in the face, though it is absolutely a matter of indifference to me what you may think about it. Possibly, I even regret, myself, that I have given so few slaps in the face during my life. But enough ... not another word on that subject of such extreme interest to you.